. Blumenthal asserted, “Mr. Berchtold, I want to congratulate and thank you for an absolutely stunning achievement. You have brought together Republicans and Democrats in an absolutely unified cause. And may I suggest respectfully that unfortunately your approach today in this hearing is going to solidify that cooperation because as I hear and read what you have to say, it’s basically, it’s not us, it’s everyone but us.
Mickelson also mentioned, “When Live Nation loses money on a concert, they can make up for that with operating income from ticketing and sponsorships. We can’t do that. We don’t have those. Pepsi doesn’t earn money from Coke, but our competitor Live Nation earns money from selling tickets to our concerts.
Berchtold’s testimony encompassed three themes. He emphasized the increasingly competitive nature of the industry, Ticketmaster’s role as a technological and marketing innovator, as well as the ongoing threat posed by “the industrial scalping of tickets, using bots to unfairly gain possession of those tickets illegally.”
Even so, he noted, “Since the merger, we have invested over $1 billion in capital to improve the Ticketmaster system. … I can say with great confidence that technologically Ticketmaster is a much better ticketing system today than it was in 2010. Its performance in large onsales is the best in the industry, it has the best marketing capabilities of any ticketing system, and it is far and away the leader in preventing fraud and getting tickets into the hands of real fan.
Then Groetzinger offered additional insight, as he revealed, “Last year, Barclays Center management came to us and said, ‘We’d like to keep using you for ticketing our basketball, but we want to be able to use Ticketmaster to ticket concerts.’ And we looked into it and couldn’t get the economics to work. So we said to them, ‘Listen, let’s just part ways amicably,’ and we did.”
Then he suggested that there had been “differing interpretations” of the original consent decree. As a result, “One of the things that we’ve done is in instances where venues are seeking to tie in a ticketing and a concert agreement into an overall deal, we have eliminated those. So that there can’t be any instance where there’s the perception of threats or retaliation associated with that bundling done at the venues request.
A sideshow to benefit politicians only. Nothing much will change from this
gimmick! wbk this is just a promo for TheErasTour, I mean do these senators have no other job besides taking care of ticket prices, even taylorswift13 herself doesn't care about this problem, instead she's having fun in UK to celebrate the new year😒